Transcription
In the mid-20th century, groundbreaking advances and life-saving resuscitation techniques opened the door to a previously impossible insight into the nature of human consciousness and existence itself. By the thousands, human beings who had experienced clinical death returned to life with extraordinary stories to tell.
Since the publication of Dr. Raymond Moody's crownbreaker "Life After Life" nearly half a century ago, near-death research has exhaustively documented compelling common threads that run through the accounts of near-death survivors. These include the perception of leaving one's body, a sense of being enveloped in overwhelming unconditional love, the review of one's life, and a feeling of perfect Oneness with the universe. Perhaps most compelling of all is the extraordinary transformative impact the NDE has on the life of the experiencer. In fact, this is not limited to individuals who experience the classical NDE, which includes an official pronouncement of clinical death. Indeed, a more recent forward to Dr. Moody's aforementioned book is authored by Dr. Eben Alexander, whose NDE-like experience, documented in his book "Proof of Heaven," unfolded in a state of coma.
Equally powerful are the accounts of those who continually faced death in the throes of addiction, trauma, abuse, and other remarkably difficult life circumstances. One such individual is Betty Guano, whose dramatic and poignant transformative account provides extraordinary insight into the potential power of sudden, spontaneous spiritual healing. Today, Betty shares with us her experience and the subsequent unfolding of spiritual awakening in her life. The links to Betty's social media can be found in the pinned comment below.
"My experience definitely transformed my life 180 degrees. Before my experience, I was a homeless methhead prostitute, strung out on heroin. I was a militant atheist. I was an orphan to suicide; my parents both committed suicide in 2007 due to their own addiction. I was a liar, a manipulator, a thief. I was a racist. I was a derelict and a degenerate. And after my spiritually transformative experience, it was as if every cell in my body absolutely demanded to transform 180 degrees. No belief that I held before do I hold now. Literally, every fiber of myself transformed with my experience. Not immediately with my experience, but my experience definitely set me up for transformation.
How some people believe that hell exists, I don't believe that hell exists because if I made it to heaven, everybody's making it to heaven. But I will say that my life before my experience was a living hell. So the way that people describe hell, you know, like fire, brimstone, you know, demons poking you with pitchforks, that's what my life felt like. That's what just my living, walking Earth experience felt like to be so tethered and anchored to addiction that every second, every breath I took was just another breath for me to be alive so that I could think about how to get more drugs, what I'd need to do to make money to get drugs, where am I going to find them, where am I going to use them, how am I going to do them, how long is it going to take? And it was just about like being in a constant state of sedation, uh, and just a constant state of disconnect. I was totally disconnected from my conscious awareness. I was completely, quote unquote, asleep. And it was a brutal, brutal life. But I didn't even know because like I had no awareness, so I didn't even know that my life was that bad. I mean, to somebody on the outside, they would be like, yeah, your life is obviously bad, you're eating out of a garbage can. But to me, I was like, oh, this is just what life is. This is the way that life is for people. I think the experience kind of really opened me up to the fact that my life was not, it was not regular. Uh, but because my life was the only life that I knew, and I was so self-centered in my disease of addiction, that I didn't have any awareness of what was going on in other people's lives. Obviously, I've seen celebrities, I know that people like live a real great life, but the people that I was surrounded by, they were living the exact same kind of life as me. So I thought, yeah, this is what life is. Life is struggle and sadness and depression and grief and lack and loss and nothing else.
So I had a drug overdose. I had a series of awakenings before my actual, uh, near-death-like experience. And I call it a near-death-like experience because nobody pronounced me dead. I wasn't in a hospital. I don't know if I actually died, uh, but definitely a version of me died if I didn't physically die. And yeah, I had an overdose. And the first part of my experience was as if I was going through a life review. And I started to experience not just my life, everyone's life, definitely the people in my immediate family, their lives. And it was as if I was taking on all of the trauma for all of my ancestors. And I come from a very dense family line, so I did feel like I was feeling for the whole world because these are all experiences that lots of people in the world have as well. Uh, like one of the things that sticks out really vividly for me is that I started to experience my mother's trauma. My mother had been dead for 11 years, and she was raped by her brother for most of her adolescence. And I felt the life experience of incest, but that wasn't part of my particular story, but I did feel it and like have to transmute it for her. And then I also felt my parents' suicide, and not only from my perspective as a grieving daughter, but then I felt it from their perspective as well. I felt my aunt losing her child. My cousin passed away when she was 20 years old. And, uh, I felt the pain that my aunt experienced as she lost her child. So I was starting, and then it went straight into like the movie "The Giver," where I started to feel every emotion that's ever happened on Earth all at the exact same moment, all at once. It was this huge download, this huge awakening. And I, when I was in those really lack emotions, like the loss of a child, suicide, anguish, despair, I thought, oh my God, this is hell. I am in hell, and this is it, you know? And I couldn't, there was no way that I could conceive anything else. And then I started to hear my dad's voice come into my awareness, and he said, "You are worthy of all the love in the universe." And he just kept chanting it over and over and over again. I started to follow his voice, and then I found myself in the light. And I was downloaded again with a bunch of stuff all at once in the light. And the first thing that I was downloaded with was that I was a divine spiritual soldier sent here on a mission with thousands of other souls. I could perceive all of us in what felt like a spaceship, and there was a commander in the center. You can call that commander Christ, or Krishna, or Buddha, or Source; it's all the same thing. And the commander was gearing us up for our trip to Earth. That we were coming down to Earth to liberate consciousness. I don't know if consciousness actually wants to be liberated, but we're here for it. And then my awareness shifted into another scene, and I found myself in front of a table of beings. And they didn't tell me who they were, but they didn't have to, because I knew that they were people in charge. And they had this big, huge book, and they were thumbing through it very casually, and they were telling me, "It's nice to see you. You're not here to stay. You're only here for information." And, you know, I have no idea what's going on, but I'm just going with it. And they're telling me that I can't stay. And I'm like, "But I just got here, and I definitely want to stay because it feels awesome here." Where I just came from, much less awesome here. Amazing! I'm staying. And they were like, "No, no, no. You have a lot. You still have to do. You're on your way back, but you're here for information."
And so then they took me through the details of my pre-birth plan. It looked like I was in a grocery store, and lining the walls of the grocery store aisles were these gigantic cereal boxes. And every cereal box had a life experience on it. And I just started filling up this empty grocery cart with every box that I could get my figurative hands on. There are no physical hands there, and I just start grabbing everything. And the one thing that really sticks out for me that I think is important to share about is that I chose the life experience of childhood sexual trauma. Now, you can't ask me as a human why I would do that because my human does not understand, but I trust that my spirit knows. And when the I picked the cereal box, a little orb of light came out with the box. And that orb of light was the soul of the man who would molest me as a small child. And I saw the reasons why we came into contract with each other. And one of the main reasons was that in a previous lifetime, I had been his abuser in the same capacity. And so in this lifetime, we were balancing the energies with each other. And, you know, being downloaded with my pre-birth plan, it broke me out of victim mentality in that moment. It was as if I could, I could perceive two tons of bondage and chains and baggage and garbage just floating off of my spirit, no longer needed. I was living in a different awareness. I had new information, and I was so thankful. And I found myself back in front of the table of beings, just completely overwhelmed with gratitude. "Thank you so much for this information. I'm so happy to know all of this. It makes so much sense now. I'm still not going back to Earth, but this has been a really fun experience. I'm going to go grab my PJs and a bowl of popcorn. I'll watch the rest of the show from up here, and I'll just get out of your way." They were like, "No, no, no. This is not a punishment. You're not going back. We're not making you go back. You're going back because you signed up for this, and you have to complete it." And I was like, "Well, you know, the body that I just came from, she's a mess. I can't go back into her. She's glitched. She can't be healed. It's literally a mess." And they said, "Okay, well, if you won't go back into her, then we'll show you the baby that you'll be born into." And this baby was going to take my life experience cart, and because of the family line that she was going to be born into, in order to experience many of those life experiences, she had some even deeper levels of societal adversity. And I thought, man, if these are my only options, starting from zero or going back into that glitched, broken body that I just came from, I guess I'll just go back into my body.
And when I was leaving and sifting back into my awareness, I heard the beings of light tell me, "Listen, the first part of your life was boot camp, and the second part of your life is going to be carrying out the mission. It's not going to be nearly as challenging. You're going to have soulmates, kindred spirits, teachers, mentors, communities, a whole world of spiritual awareness to help you on your path. Just trust us." And I was like, "I do not trust you guys. Whatever." And I found myself back in my body. And, you know, I just wrote it off as drug-induced psychosis. All I knew was that I took a bunch of drugs, and then all of a sudden, I thought I was talking to God. And, you know, I just wrote the whole thing off. I just thought, damn, that was crazy. I'm never going to be that messed up again. And after that, my world just became very small and full of synchronicity and full of divine guidance. Uh, and it took me a couple of months to pull it together, but I realized that my experience was a real one. I didn't know what kind of experience it was. I had never heard of a near-death experience. I had never heard of spiritual awakening or anything like that. And it took me a long time to figure out what did happen to me. But here I am, and living in awareness with a little bit of knowledge and some language from my experience.
I think again, for me, everything was very chaotic because I didn't have any awareness of what any of this was. But I just knew that all of a sudden, I had new information. Before my experience, I couldn't even string sentences together because I was a junkie. And the whole depth of my vocabulary before my experience was just this long laundry list of drugs that I used and how much money it cost to be with me. And I didn't have room in my head for any other thoughts because I didn't need any other thoughts. My whole world was just centered around this one thing: using drugs. And then all of a sudden, I have this experience, and now I'm having all these huge, gigantic thoughts like, what are humans? What is Earth? What are we doing here? And these quantum questions started to creep into my head. And then I set intention. Once I just started kind of trusting the voices that I was hearing because they were all very benevolent and helping me, once I started to trust them, I said, "Send me the books that I need to help me understand more of what's going on." And that's when I found "A Course in Miracles." And "A Course in Miracles" completely changed my life. And for anybody who doesn't know, it's a channeled metaphysical text. It's the word Jesus is the author, and it's channeled through the mind of a militant atheist psychotherapist from Columbia University in the 1970s. So Jesus didn't leave us with the mis-translated, jumbled words of the Bible. He came back through this woman to channel a message for us. And that text is one of the closest things that I have to my spiritual experience because I realized in my spiritual experience that I don't know what anything is for. Like, how could I? I just experienced a whole world that I never knew existed. So I definitely don't know what that world is for, and I don't know what this world is for, that's for sure.
And so the beginning of the workbook lessons in "A Course in Miracles" is about deconstructing constructs, physical constructs, social constructs, emotional constructs, and really being able to see everyone. It's about the Oneness, and I definitely saw that in my near-death-like experience. And another thing in "A Course in Miracles" is in lesson, oh, I thought I would be cool and quote what lesson it was, but I can't remember. But in one of the lessons, it says that the script is written. And that is something that I hold very dearly to me because for me, through my lens of perception, that solidifies my knowledge and pre-birth planning. Because in "A Course in Miracles," it tells me that the script is written. And then also in "A Course in Miracles," it talks about the final judgment. And when you read about the final judgment, which there is no such thing as judgment, which is another one of my takeaways from my near-death experience, so when you read about the final judgment, it kind of sounds like a near-death experience. It talks about this great white flash of light, and then it says that there is no such thing as condemnation, that the only judgment is that of unconditional love because that is all that God is, is unconditional love. So for me, that book really helped me a lot. And I had to read a lot of books about the course before I could understand the course. I think I read a dozen books just about it before I even tried to start actually reading the course itself because it's very dense. At first, I thought that it was a handbook for the recently deceased, like in the movie "Beetlejuice," because it reads like stereo instructions. I was like, where's my caseworker to help me get through this? What am I reading right now? And, um, and reading books about the course really helped.
Today, I have a lot of different kinds of gifts. When I first had my, before my experience, I didn't have very many gifts at all. Although I did manage to survive life for 35 years of being on Earth, I have no idea how I managed to do that, so there's some sort of resilience there that's definitely a talent. But then after my experience, I was really kind of psychically opened up where I could read energy, I could see people's thoughts, I had telepathy with other people, I could see energy and trees and animals and all these different things. And I also was really good at practicing the art of bibliomancy, which I'm still very good at, which is where you open up a book to a random page, and it's a message directly for you. And eventually, I asked to have my gifts turned down. And now my spiritual gifts come up in the form of creating conscious space for other experiencers, assisting people through transformation, shepherding others to spiritual community. One of my greatest integration tools that I found was the connection to other people because I just kept thinking that I wanted to go back to the spiritual experience. How do I get back to heaven? How do I feel the Oneness again? And then one day I realized that it wasn't about going back to heaven, it was about bringing heaven here. And "A Course in Miracles" helps me realize that too. And so in order to create heaven on Earth, for me, one of the things that I do is connect with other people because that's what I believe we're here to do is to make connection with each other.
A big part of my journey, obviously, is addiction recovery, and that's something that I do every day. I belong to a 12-step fellowship. I make 12-step meetings every day. And there was a lot of different layers to my addiction because it wasn't just, you know, I, it seemed like it was very easy for me to let go of drugs, even though I was on drugs for 22 years. But I had this spontaneous healing. It really, it helped me out of heroin withdrawal. It helped me get onto a whole different path. But then I realized that it was not about the drugs, it was about feeling my feelings. And I don't want to feel my feelings. I don't think I can handle them. My addiction has convinced me my whole life that I can't handle my feelings. So then I developed a bunch of eating disorders. I developed person obsession. I love getting obsessed with people that don't know that I exist. I developed, you know, like now I wrestle with productivity addiction. And I just let go of sugar around eight months ago. You know, it's, it's very layered. So for me, it's about getting to the core of my disease of addiction, which is about separation. And again, "A Course in Miracles" teaches us about separation as well. And so for me, the antidote to separation is connection. And so that's what I make sure that I do on a daily basis. I'm not perfect. I'm not healed. I'm not, you know, enlightened by any, by any sense of the words. But I do my best each and every day. And some days are better than others. You know, some days I make intention in the morning, I'm going to be the best version of myself, and then one hour later, I'm yelling at somebody on the subway. Okay, I could try again. Let me just start my day over and try that all over again. Uh, but I'm definitely way better than I ever have been, way better than I was before. And that's my greatest gift from my spiritual experience is the knowledge, not the belief, the knowledge, the deep-seated knowledge that there is no such thing as condemnation. None. Okay? Which also means like Hitler is in heaven, and, you know, a Stalin, like all these people that we never would want to think could be forgiven, they are also all just playing a part here. These are costumes that we're wearing. I'm wearing a human costume here on Earth, and this costume has a personality profile assigned to it. And the personality profile can shift with me throughout the stages of my life. But I'm here to play a role. And again, the knowing in the pre-birth planning, I've played a villain to a lot of people in their storylines, and a lot of people have played the role of villain to me, and I've played the role of victim. But those were just roles that we were playing. And today, because I have awareness of what's, you know, like this picture of we're all playing roles with each other, I can make a conscious effort to not play that role. And I'm not saying that I don't, you know, like occasionally unintentionally abuse people. I still have defects of character within my personality profile. But I don't intentionally cause harm anymore. And that's something that I never thought that I could let go of.
And people get really upset when they hear that there's no condemnation because then they think, well, what's the moris? The moral compass that I live my life by? So for me, my moral compass is that if it's aligned with spiritual virtues, then it's for the highest good. So spiritual virtues are patience, honesty, open-mindedness, willingness, acceptance, empathy, tolerance, unconditional love. So if what you're doing is aligned with that, then it's more than likely for the highest good. And, you know, the highest good for you and the highest good for all. But again, this is all so temporary. It's just a movie. Nothing's real. If you want to be like a crackhead, drug-dealing prostitute, you can. You're still going to make it to heaven. Your quality of life on Earth might be kind of shitty. Anyway, yeah, those are my thoughts on that. My thoughts shape my reality, and your thoughts shape your reality, and that is something that I definitely know. My thoughts before were, I'm homeless, I'm a prostitute, I have to use drugs every day, I hate my life. And so that was my reality. And then now, being in awareness and being able to actually heal the underlying wounds to change the thoughts around, now my thoughts are, I'm an abundant individual, I'm surrounded by spiritual community, I love my life, and I'm here to be of service. And that now shapes my reality. So I think the idea of being able to shift your thoughts to shift your world is a true one. The thing is, is that a lot of us, myself included, I had a lot of underlying wounds that I had to address. I couldn't just think like, just think positive thoughts and your life will be so much better. I don't doubt that that can happen for people. I believe in miracles. I'm a miracle. You're a miracle. It's a miracle that we're on Earth at the same time. Miracles happen. I know that you could just have an instant quantum leap, a shift of consciousness. But for me, doing that internal work, diving into my shadow, recognizing the pieces of trauma from my from my youth and all of those things, that was really something that I had to get into so that I could really believe my new thoughts."
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[Applause]
Yeah, yeah.
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Live. Yeah. Gather around you peaceful spirits in this circle bound in joy. No need for shameful secrets of like mind, we quickly join. All warrior swords laid down in peace, their courage proved at last. All mournful cries of sorrow cease, forgiveness frees the p.
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Defying pain, we stand as one, our differences ignored. How great our joy to find the sun, ourselves released from war. I love so free, my belly aches. He electric golden bliss. By simple truths, we finally see, a soft angelic k. I'm so joyful I could cry. The dream at last is done. Awake, my spirit soars in flight, to grief the rising sun.
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Oh, my all pain is gone. God welcomes my return. Homecoming's path now clearly drawn. Illusion simply burns. Our circle grows in boundless strength. Your presence now we call. Limitless is spirits L since long before the.
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Fall. All guilt and sorrow lie outside the circle. Sacred space we welcome in all displaced lives, offering God.
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Grace. And laughing now, we freely share all gifts we fed. We lost the final step we gravely dare. We discuss there's no.
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Cause. I'm so joyful I could cry. The dream at last is done. Awake, my spirit soars in flight, to greet the rising.
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Sun. Oh, my old pain is gone. God welcomes my return. Homecoming's part now clearly drawn. The nightmare simply burns.